The wind blew past the ship, rustling the golden sails with a soft, hollow sigh.
The Mad Prince stood at the bow, his body going unnaturally, terrifyingly still.
A strange, prickling sensation manifested at the back of his neck.
It was not the threat of an approaching enemy.
It was not the presence of a Nightmare Creature lurking beneath the liquid glass of the river.
It was a feeling deep within his soul sea—a sudden, subtle gap in the fabric of his thoughts.
His brow furrowed slightly.
‘Wait…’
He lowered his hand, his obsidian eyes fixing blankly on the distant horizon where the river met the sky.
‘Am I…
missing someone?’
The question echoed through his mind, quiet at first, like a pebble dropped into a deep well.
But as the seconds ticked by, the pebble hit no bottom.
Instead, the well expanded into a wide, dark abyss.
He asked himself again, forcing his mind to re-examine the calculations:
‘Am I missing someone?’
He counted them on his pale, cracked fingers, repeating the names of the cohort that had entered the Third Nightmare through the Great River:
Sunless.
Nephis.
Kai.
Effie.
Jet.
Mordret.
Six
There were six members of the cohort.
Six souls who had stepped off the edge of time and descended into the Tomb of Ariel.
He had killed Sunless.
Nephis was dead.
Torment was dead.
Kai, Effie, Jet, and Mordret and the four Plagues are remaining.
Six names.
Six souls.
The math was absolute.
It was flawless.
It accounted for every single person who had entered the Nightmare.
And yet…
why did his mind feel so hollow?
Why did he feel a sharp, razor-like absence in his memories, as if a thread had been cleanly severed from his consciousness without his permission?
The Mad Prince stood motionlessly, his mind racing through centuries of accumulated loops at a terrifying speed.
He searched through the blood, the madness of the Sin of Solace, the dark memories of his Defilement, searching for the source of this sudden, sickening dissonance. New chapters come out on NovelPing first.
It was like staring at a completed puzzle, seeing every single piece neatly fitted into place, yet feeling with absolute, terrifying certainty that the entire picture was wrong.
‘Why?’ he thought, his jaw clenching tightly as a sudden wave of cold, unnatural dread washed over his corrupted soul.
‘Why does my mind feel like a page has been ripped out?’
He thought back to the moment he had boarded the Chain Breaker.
He remembered finding Torment sitting on the deck, waiting for him.
He remembered mockingly asking her about her Machiavellian plans.
And then, he tried to remember something else.
He reached into his mind, clawing through the vast, dark archives of centuries of accumulated loops.
He searched for the exact sequence of events on the deck—for what Torment had done in those few frantic seconds before he had plunged his fingers into her eye sockets.
Nothing.
There was no memory to grasp.
It was not like forgetting a minor detail, or having a fleeting thought slip away like mist.
It was far more insidious.
Where a memory ought to have rested, there was only a smooth, cold void.
A pristine, surgical scar carved cleanly across the fabric of his soul.
The Mad Prince’s eyes narrowed into tiny, blood-red pinpricks.
‘She…’
A sickening, icy dread washed over his corrupted heart.
He recalled the moment Torment had opened her eyes.
He had felt that subtle, terrifying intrusion—a slender, invisible needle of fate piercing the absolute darkness of his mind.
He had reacted instantly, faster than time itself, gouging her eyes out and crushing them in his palm.
He had believed, in his supreme arrogance, that he had severed the intrusion before she could accomplish anything.
He had been wrong.
Torment hadn’t been trying to attack his mind.
She hadn’t been trying to alter his willpower or force a command through his Defilement.
She had used her dying breath to perform a surgical strike.
She had reached into his mental weave, found a specific, vital thread of knowledge, and ripped it out entirely.
She had used the lingering authority of her oracle’s gaze to rewrite his memories, erasing an identity from his consciousness so thoroughly that even the concept of its absence was nearly impossible to trace.
The Mad Prince stood frozen at the bow of the Chain Breaker, his pale skin turning ashen.
‘What did she take?’
He tried to think.
He forced his mind—the mind of a Transcendent Titan, an ancient, terrifying engine of calculation—to analyze the void.
Who was missing?
What was missing?
He counted the cohort again.
He went through the names like a madman repeating an incantation:
Nephis.
Kai.
Effie.
Jet.
Mordret.
The arithmetic was flawless.
It matched the records of the Spell.
It matched every physical observation he could make.
There were no extra spaces in his cohort, no missing seats on the boat, no extra cores in his memory
And yet, his mind screamed at him.
It was like suffering from a phantom limb.
He could feel the aching, throbbing weight of a missing truth, but when he reached out to touch it, there was nothing there.
He was missing the identity of someone—or something—so fundamental that its absence left his soul feeling lopsided, hollowed out, and utterly deceived.
Was there an seventh person?
A secret player moving through the shadows of the Tomb of Ariel?
A name he had spoken a thousand times that had now been violently excised from his vocabulary?
Or was it someone right in front of him whose true nature had been scrubbed clean from his mind?
He didn’t know.
He couldn’t know.
Because how could a man search for a face he had been made to forget ever existed?
Torment had played him.
The blind, rotting bitch had let him butcher her, let him rip her eyes out, let him convert her into a Shadow—all to deliver a fatal, permanent blind spot directly into his mind.
She had ensured that no matter how powerful he became, no matter if he commanded seven Transcendent Titans, he would navigate the rest of this Nightmare completely blind to a critical piece of the puzzle.
A low, rasping breath escaped the Mad Prince’s cracked lips.
The wind swept over the bloody deck of the ship, carrying the cold, indifferent sigh of the Great River.
He raised his hands and looked at his pale, clawed fingers.
They were trembling.
Not with fear, the Mad Prince felt no fear—but with a terrifying, unadulterated, intoxicating rage.
“You…” he whispered, his voice dropping into a dark, guttural hiss that curdled the air around him.
He threw his head back, staring up at the seven suns burning in the sky, and let out a dark, manic chuckle that carried across the vast expanse of time.
“You cursed, blind whore…” the Mad Prince rasped, his obsidian eyes burning with pure, lightless madness.
“You erased it. You erased them from my mind.”
He stared down the river, his jaw set, his mind clawing fruitlessly at the silent void inside his head.
He was a Transcendent Titan.
He held the authority of the Nightmare Spell.
He was the master of shadows.
And yet, standing alone on the blood-soaked ship, the Mad Prince realized with absolute, horrifying certainty that he was hunting an enemy whose very name he had been robbed of ever knowing.